In the news
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- A New Way to Enjoy Nicotine Addiction: Amid an increasingly hostile climate towards secondhand smoke and tobacco advertising, tobacco companies are battling to maintain both their nicotine markets and the ability to use their logos. R.J. Reynolds stopped advertising cigarettes in magazines in 2008, but is once again printing its Camel logo in major magazines like Rolling Stone, Sports Illustrated and Maxim, in ads for a new form of non-combusted tobacco called "snus" (rhymes with "moose").
 The cover of the Yes Men's fake New York Post edition
- U.S. Chamber of Commerce Downsized: Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E), a California-based power utility, has resigned from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce over what the utility's chairman and CEO, Peter Darbee, describes as "fundamental differences" over climate change policy. PG&E's resignation was sparked by moves by the Chamber of Commerce to challenge a determination by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency that greenhouse gases from motor vehicle emissions endanger public health and welfare.
- Humana's Medicare Scare Called Out: The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) is taking a closer look at insurance giant Humana. Humana sent alarming mass mailings to people enrolled in one or more of its plans. The Humana letters claim that health care reform proposals under consideration by Congress could hurt "millions of seniors and disabled individuals [who] could lose many of the important benefits and services that make Medicare advantage health plans so valuable." CMS demanded that Humana cease "immediately all such mailings to Medicare plan members and to remove any related materials directed to Medicare enrollees from your website."
- Dr. Evil and the Payday Loan Sharks: The Center for Economic and Entrepreneurial Literacy (CEEL) is one of lobbyist and serial corporate front man Rick Berman's "more recent creations," writes Daniel Schulman. "CEEL's surveys -- designed to show that Americans don't know diddly about finances and therefore deserve some of the blame for the current economic tumult -- have been quoted on the nightly news and are frequently cited in newspapers. And CEEL has also promoted payday loans as a lifeline for desperate borrowers." While "there is no evidence that CEEL is bankrolled by the finance industry or payday lenders ... some of its talking points are strikingly similar to the ones that payday lenders have been repeating for years."
- The Pentagon's New Multi-Lingual Web: The U.S. Special Operations Command awarded General Dynamics Information Technology a $10.1 million contract to build the "Trans Regional Web Initiative." The project will include "a minimum of two and no more than twelve websites" in languages such as Arabic, French, English, Chinese, Farsi, Russian, Urdu and Malay / Indonesian, in support of U.S. military "combatant commands." General Dynamics is tasked with recruiting a "network of native / indigenous content contributors with backgrounds in politics, academics, security, culture, entertainment, and other aspects of the Global War on Terror, which appeal to identified foreign target audiences."
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Recent blogs on PR Watch
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- John Stauber notes that Lisa Graves, the Executive Director of the Center for Media and Democracy, was the only public interest group advocate invited to testify in Washington on Wednesday, September 23, before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee in its hearing on the Patriot Act and national security surveillance issues. See CMD's Lisa Graves Testifies Before U.S. Senate on Patriot Act, September 23;
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Editor's pick of the week
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One of the groups spearheading opposition to proposals to reform the U.S. healthcare system is FreedomWorks. In 2009, FreedomWorks has been a prominent opponent of proposals by U.S. President Barack Obama to reform the U.S. healthcare system, the Waxman-Markey Climate Bill to address global warming, and state proposals to raise taxes. Who are they?
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Projects for citizen editors
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With the Waxman-Markey climate change bill before the U.S. Senate, coal and energy utility lobbyists are out in force. While the legislation will only have direct effect in the United States, it will indirectly have a major influence on the negotiation of a replacement agreement to the Kyoto Protocol. (The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change hopes to complete a new climate change agreement at the COP15 conference in Copenhagen in December.) Earlier this year, the Center for Public Integrity, a non-profit investigative journalism group based in Washington D.C., launched a database on the mostly corporate lobbyists working on climate change issues. If you would like to help bring to the fore the details of the lobbying firms and individual lobbyists helping the top ten U.S. power utilities, here's a citizen journalism project that you can help with. See here for more details. If you have never added material to SourceWatch before, don't worry, as three of our regular editors are at hand to help get you started.
If this is your first time editing on SourceWatch, you can register here, and learn more about adding information to the site here, here, here and here. Hold onto your hat, have fun, and thanks for your help!
And if you would like to work on something else, take a look at some of our earlier citizen journalism projects here.
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Popular articles over the last week
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The most popular pages over the last week have included those on Tom DeLay, the former Republican member of the U.S. House of Representatives, who made an appearance on ABC's Dancing with the Stars program. Other popular page have been the listing of Existing U.S. Coal Plants, Public relations firms, think tanks, greenwashing and Corporate Social Responsibility. The most popular new page has been the Inside Zion Oil article which looks at an oil exploration company that blends religion with its search for oil in Israel.
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What they're saying about SourceWatch
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"The folks at the Center for Media and Democracy have done incredible work documenting fake grassroots ("astroturf") groups. Here, they're helping protects the rights of all Americans to exercise their right to vote. They are completely non-partisan. These guys are the real deal." Craig Newmark, Craig's List
"A truly impressive project based on cutting edge web technology." David Korten, author of When Corporations Rule the World and The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community.
"The troublemakers at the Center for Media and Democracy, for example, point to dozens of examples of "greenwashing," which they defined as the "unjustified appropriation of environmental virtue by a company, an industry, a government or even a non-government organization to sell a product, a policy" or rehabilitate an image. In the center's view, many enterprises labeled green don't deserve the name.—Jack Shafer, "Green Is the New Yellow: On the excesses of 'green' journalism", Slate, July 6, 2007.
"As a journalist frequently on the receiving end of various PR campaigns, some of them based on disinformation, others front groups for undisclosed interests, [CMD's SourceWatch] is an invaluable resource."—Michael Pollan author of The Botany of Desire
"Thanks for all your help. There's no way I could have done my piece on big PR and global warming without the CMD [Center for Media and Democracy] and your fabulous websites."—Zoe Cormier, journalist, Canada
"The dearth of information on the [U.S.] government [lobbying] disclosure forms about the other business-backed coalitions comes in stark contrast to the data about them culled from media reports, websites, press releases and Internal Revenue Service documents and posted by SourceWatch, a website that tracks advocacy groups." Jeanne Cummings, 'New disclosure reports lack clarity", Politico, April 29, 2008.
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